Top Colleges 2018: The Methodology

Harvard University lands at No. 1 on the Forbes Top Colleges 2018 list.2017 - The Boston Globe

Now in its 11th year, the FORBES list of America’s Top Colleges has always focused on the direct benefits schools provide their graduates. Especially at a time when Americans owe more than $1 trillion in student loan debt, we believe it’s important to value “outputs” rather than “inputs.” While other lists consider acceptance rates and admitted students’ SAT scores, we look at alumni salaries, debt after graduation, retention and graduation rates, debt load upon graduation, alumni salaries and signs of individual success including academic and career accolades.

For students who are laser-focused on finding top-notch education at a great value, check out our 2018 Best Value Colleges, which elevates the weights of variables like debt load and factors in a school’s net price.

Here is how we selected schools and weighted measures for the list:

Schools Considered For The List

We started with all schools classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as doctoral research universities, master’s colleges and universities and baccalaureate colleges, along with some special-focus categories including business, engineering and art schools, such as Rhode Island School of Design or Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. We narrowed the list to schools that had sufficient data available from five other sources. Those include two huge data sets compiled by the U.S. Department of Education, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, created by the Obama administration in 2013 to track information about students who receive federal financial aid. We also use information from PayScale, a privately-owned website with a vast amount of self-reported salary data and Niche, another privately owned site that draws from tens of millions of student surveys. Two high-performing schools, Hillsdale and Grove City College, do not receive federal funding and thus do not appear in the College Scorecard; their other data is re-weighed to account for the lack of debt data.

We excluded schools with fewer than 300 undergraduates (with the exception of Marlboro College, a Vermont school that stands out for its academics). We cut schools that retained fewer than 60% of their students over a three-year period (except for Sweet Briar College, a small Virginia women’s school whose data is skewed by its near-closure in 2015, and Weber State in Utah which has markedly improved its retention rate over the last three years). We also cut schools whose six-year graduation rate was below 25%. We then scored every school on the metrics detailed below.

All data used was the most recent final release data available. For schools that had near-complete data sets but were missing one or two data points, we gave proportionally more weight to other variables.

Alumni Salary (20%)

To calculate a school’s salary score, we considered four data points: the school’s early career earnings (1-4 years after graduation) from PayScale, mid-career earnings (10-plus years) from PayScale, and the earnings of federal financial aid recipients six years and 10 years after starting college from College Scorecard.

Because paying for college is a long-term investment, early career earnings accounted for only a third of our salary score, and later earnings two thirds. PayScale’s data made up 85% of the salary score and College Scorecard the remaining 15%.

Debt (20%)

We drew all of our debt data from College Scorecard. We got half of our debt score by multiplying the average federal student loan debt per borrower at each school by the percentage of students at the school who took out federal loans. The other half of our debt score came from two-year and three-year federal student loan default rates.

Student Experience (20%)

niche

We assume that students who believe their college experience is worthwhile will remain in school. Therefore we drew most of our student experience score, 15% of our total score, from a school’s first-year-to-sophomore retention rate as recorded by IPEDS, averaging the rates for the most recent three years. We drew the remainder of our student experience score, 5% of our total, from Niche, which administers surveys to more than 90,000 students and alumni. We used their survey data that measured both professor quality and student life. Both use a GPA scale: An A for professor satisfaction would give a school a 4.00 grade, a B a 3.00, and so on.

American Leaders List (15%)

Along with alumni salary, we measure graduates’ success using a data set we compile ourselves, The American Leaders List, is a roster thousands of successful people and their alma maters. We use FORBES databases including the Forbes 400, the Richest Self-Made Women list, the Most Powerful Women list and 30 Under 30. We also count current leaders in public service: U.S. Supreme Court Justices, the President and his Cabinet, members of the U.S. Congress and state governors. In addition, we count winners of the following awards over the last one-to-four years based on the number of recipients for each: MacArthur Fellowship, Nobel Prize, Breakthrough Prize, Lasker Prize, Fields Prize, Academy Awards, Oscars, Tony’s, NAACP Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, major sport all-stars, Presidential Medals and Pulitzer Prizes. We blended schools’ raw numbers of alumni leaders and its number of leaders adjusted for its number of undergraduates.

Academic Success (12.5%)

To further measure graduates’ success, we looked at academic achievements. We drew half of this score, 6.25% of our total score, by counting the number of academic awards won by alumni at each school for the past one-to-four years, depending on the number of recipients per year for each. We counted the Fulbright, Truman, Goldwater, Gates, Cambridge and Rhodes Scholarships and weighed them as a percentage of the undergraduate student body. We drew the second half of this category, or 6.25% of our total, from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates. We used the three-year average number of Ph.D. recipients who spent their undergraduate careers at each institution. Both are calculated as a blend of schools’ raw numbers of award winners and of doctorates and those numbers adjusted for its number of undergraduates.

Graduation Rate (12.5%)

We gave credit to schools that motivate, guide and support students to graduate in a timely manner, saving on tuition and getting into the workforce as soon as possible. We divided our graduation rate calculation into three pieces. The largest is four-year graduation rate, which accounted for 7.5% of our total score. We used data from IPEDS and averaged the rate for the most recent three years. We used the same source and methodology to calculate six-year graduation rates, which counted for 2.5% of our overall score. And we use IPEDS data and the same methodology to count the graduation rates for Pell grant recipients, which accounted for 2.5% of our overall score. Pell grants go to economically disadvantaged students, and we believe schools deserve credit for supporting these students.

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Caveat: As noted in this post by Forbes contributor and Pace University president Marvin Krislov, IPEDS’ graduation rate statistics only count full-time undergraduates enrolled in college for the first time, who finish their bachelor’s at the same institution where they started.

I am an assistant editor at Forbes, working on projects including the Top Colleges, Top Two-Year Trade Schools and the World's Billionaires. I also work on Forbes' daily Alexa briefing and our Daily Dozen newsletter. I'm a proud New Jersey native, Penn alumnus and New York ...